Ruskin Bond deals with supernatural in new book

Ruskin Bond, an Indian born author, grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla wrote his first novel the Room on the Roof at his age of seventeen.

In the book, readers will befriend Jimmy the jinn who has trouble keeping his hands to himself, be witness to the mischief of the ‘pisach’ and ‘churel’ who live in the peepul tree, and find themselves in the company of a blood-thirsty vampire cat, among other tales written in Bond’s inimitable style and riveting to the core. “Everyone likes to hear stories about haunted houses; even skeptics will listen to a ghost story, while casting doubts on its veracity,” says Bond. 

According to him, old dark bungalows and forest rest houses have a reputation for being haunted. “And most hill stations have their resident ghosts – and ghost-writers! But I will not extend this catalogue of ghostly hauntings and visitations, as I do not want to discourage tourists from visiting Landour and Mussoorie. In some countries, ghosts are an added attraction for tourists. Britain boasts of hundreds of haunted castles and stately homes, and visitors to Romania seek out Transylvania and Dracula’s castle,” he writes.

In one of the stories titled “Ghosts of a Peepul Tree”, he goes on to describe the different types of ghosts in India. “The villages of India have always harboured a large variety of ghosts, some of them good, some evil. There are the ‘prets’ and ‘bhoots’, both the spirits of dead men, and the ‘churels’, ghosts of women who change their shape after death. Then there is the ‘pisach’, a sort of hobgoblin; and the ‘munjia’, a mischievous, and sometimes sinister, evil spirit,” he says, adding one thing they have in common: nearly all of them choose to live in the peepul tree. Bond had received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Delhi government’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for his ‘total contribution to children’s literature’ in 2013 and was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2014.